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Could sex robots and virtual reality treat paedophilia?

VR and sex robots might treat an intractable problem – or they could make it worse. Either way, it’s time to stop putting discomfort ahead of science

Is VR helpful or harmful?

Artur Debat/Getty

By Aviva Rutkin

LAST month, at the Forbidden Research event at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a panel of roboticists posed an inflammatory question. Should paedophiles be handed prescriptions for sex robots built to resemble children?

This isn’t as hypothetical as you might think. Japanese company Trottla already ships child-sized sex dolls globally. Earlier this year, a Canadian man faced trial after he was arrested for ordering such a doll, which is considered child pornography under Canadian law. He could go to jail for seven years.

But what if dolls like these could help rather than hurt? Ron Arkin, a robotics engineer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, and Kate Darling, who studies human-robot interaction at MIT argue that virtual reality and sex robots might function as an outlet to redirect dark desires towards machines and away from real children. If it works, it could help past offenders reintegrate harmlessly into society as well as helping prevent those who have never offended from doing so.

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At the moment, there is a hidden population who have urges but are desperate not to act on them. These people are at best ignored by legal and medical systems that could help them. At worst, mandated reporting laws mean that admitting those urges – even when seeking help from a mental health professional – can trigger an official report and social and legal consequences. It’s down to policies like these that we don’t know for sure how prevalent paedophilia is. Our best estimates suggest that it occurs in 0.5 to 1 per cent of the population.

VR is being mooted as a way towards more accurate diagnosis. Patrice Renaud, a psychologist at the University of Montreal, Canada, sees individuals referred by the court or specialised clinics, and must assess whether they pose a danger to others. To do so, he attaches subjects to a suite of physical measurement devices, then exposes them to sexual stimuli. In the case of paedophiles, the stimuli used to be actual photographs of children obtained during police raids. That practice was banned in Canada, so Renaud’s lab turned to audio recordings describing sexual scenarios. However, Renaud says these aren’t sufficiently realistic.

So he began to wonder if VR pornography could do better, and avoid the moral concerns posed by real pictures. In a series of experiments, he and his team showed that non-deviant men and sexual offenders both responded realistically to VR stimuli.

Renaud’s lab currently focuses on using VR for assessment, but he also plans to explore synthetic pornography for treatment. There’s plenty of precedent: VR is increasingly used to treat phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder and schizophrenia.

For paedophilia, there are few other options. “It’s very difficult to treat,” he says. “You cannot change this sexual preference in itself as you can change a bad habit like smoking.” But perhaps VR – coupled for example, with cognitive behavioural therapy – could help people learn to cope with and understand their desires. In a controlled lab setting, a sex robot might make the simulations even more realistic.

Some scientists are cautiously optimistic about the idea. “It is possible that virtual pornography or robots might be a safer outlet for at least some individuals,” says Michael C. Seto, at Canada’s Royal Ottawa Health Care Group.

But Renaud cautions that it may also have the opposite effect: a bot could normalise the behaviour and promote “the need to go further and to cross the line with real victims”.

“We just don’t know,” says Darling. “We have no idea what direction this goes in and we can’t research it.” Funding is scarce, and it isn’t easy to find a group of paedophiles willing to participate in research. Any study would also be likely to provoke objections from many corners – such as the Campaign Against Sex Robots, which argued in a paper last year that technological sexual substitutes haven’t been shown to reduce demand for prostitutes.

It’s only a matter of time before dolls like the ones sold by Trottla come with artificial intelligence. Will more realistic technologies help reduce the problem, or make it worse? We need to start figuring out what the impact will be. As Arkin said at the event, “The cost if we don’t explore it is intolerably high.”

This article appeared in print under the headline “Curbing dark desires”